13 Ridiculous Ways to Store Your Books

Storing books used to be so easy: all one would have to do is place a book on a shelf and hey presto! Your books are displayed.

Some people have decided that bookshelves are so last century and have been attempting some daring and kooky shelving options. Books can now be dangled, strung up, float on invisible shelves, be shoved in some foam padding, or displayed like an arty picture. Anything constitutes a shelf now: pipes, crates, a knife block- the ultimate recycling.

Check out some of the ridiculous idea below and see if you fancy adopting one of these shelving ideas!

TFW your partner is a plumber and all you got for Christmas were some pipes…

Picture this in your home…

Valentine’s Day should be magical, and a moment to share how you feel about the object of your affections. If you are both fans of Harry Potter and his whole wizarding world then artist Ben Kling has what you need.

From his Tumblr page, Ben shows us some of his best work to date- Harry Potter themed Valentine’s cards! Not all of them are PG13- be warned- and they are all slightly awkward, pun-filled, and full of magic.

If you love someone who should’ve attended Hogwarts then we have the cards for you, but be warned- there is the occasional swear word and distinct lack of romance…

Today we want to share with you this beautiful animated short film that shows the way books are part of your life, and how far a lifetime of reading can take you.

The creator, Renaud Plante contacted me this week to share the video and I just had to share it with you as I think you will all love it.

In the short film, which is called Un monde à découvrir (A World to Discover), a young boy goes to a library and discovers, in books and their words, a universe that will follow him until the end of his life. I’m sure a lot of you will relate.

Some readers might make annotations in the margins of books they’re reading in order to better understand the characters, themes, and plot-lines, but one man has taken to creating mini covers for each book he reads. James is an Australian who now teaches in the United States and, in 2018, he decided that he would create a mini cover for each book in order to motivate his reading and to encourage himself to reflect on what he’d read. James shared his work on Reddit, where it quickly blew up. Take a look at his alternative covers, we think they’re good enough to be the real deal.Read More

Tolkien is best known for his high fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings which feature original drawings by the author himself. The fact he created his own maps and illustrations for the fictional world comes as no surprise; Middle Earth was created by Tolkien with its own history, languages, and a clear sense of what the world looked like.

According to the library’s director, Colin B. Bailey, “The Morgan exhibition is your only opportunity in America to see the largest collection ever assembled of J.R.R. Tolkien’s original drawings, manuscripts, and maps. ”

Visitors to the Morgan Library in NY will get the chance to see book manuscripts, hand-drawn maps, original illustrations of Smaug, Sauron’s Dark Tower of Barad-dûr, and much more. Additional to the original artworks, photographs of JRR Tolkien during his childhood will also be available.

The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden was opened in 2002. The idea for the garden was first imagined when the author visited Springfield in 1986, and after his death in 1991 his widow Audrey gave her blessing for his work to be immortalised in a memorial garden full of bronze statues. Seuss’s own stepdaughter, sculptor Lark Grey Dimond-Cates, made over 30 statues in bronze for her late step-father, and the statues are set among the grounds of Springfield Museum.

Surrounded by art and science museums and galleries, Seuss’s garden is a fun, exciting, but surprisingly peaceful, place to visit Lark captured his and his character’s spirits perfectly in bronze.

Literary maps can be very useful when a story involves a journey, or several lands, and adds some detail to the book.

When a book contains a map it is almost a guarantee that the story will be a great adventure! Harry Potter, Treasure Island, The Hobbit, and so many others include a map of the fictional lands involved in the plot to help the reader feel closer to the action.

In Huw Lewis-Jones’s An Atlas of Imaginary Lands includes the very map that kicked off Treasure Island, a detailed map of Moomin Valley, and The Marauders Map from the Harry Potter series, among many others.